Blogs vs. Web Pages

One of the advantages to a blog over a "regular" web page is the lack of format. Most web sites have a theme that holds them together; while a lot of blogs also tend to follow a central theme, there’s nothing that says they have to. Besides, blogs are so much easier to create and maintain.

Take, for example, this post. I’m using it to complain about the completely fruitless time I spent yesterday afternoon, last evening, and this morning trying to watch a movie on DVD. Were I to chronicle my adventures (or rather, misadventures) on a web page, I’d have to fire up my HTML editor, writer the article ad then add the HTML. But with my blog entry, I just launch Qumana, write what I want, and then post it. Simple. Done.

Would that watching a movie were so simple! I have a small television and combination DVD/VHS player in my bedroom, neither of which I’ve used in about 3 years. In the first place, I don’t have cable or satellite. In the second place, I don’t watch that many movies. And in the third place, on those rare occasions that I do watch a movie, I usually watch it on one of my laptops. And therein lies the problem.

One of my laptops runs Linux, and one runs Windows XP. At one time, the Linux distribution was Ubuntu. But I replaced it a couple of months ago with PCLinuxOS (PCLOS). I haven’t had occasion since then to watch a movie on that system. With Ubuntu, everything worked fine. But I bought a new DVD the other day, and decided to watch it this weekend. When I fired up my Linux system and loaded the DVD, it played the FBI warning screen, the Interpol warning screen, and then the MPAA rating screen. That’s as far as it got.

Okay, I had recently upgraded PCLOS to a beta version, so maybe that was the problem. So I reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled the previous version. No go. Same problem. Well, I knew that Ubuntu worked, so I reinstalled it and started to watch the movie. No problem!

Until it got past the intro and into the movie itself, at which point the bottom 1/8th of the screen was jumpy. So I gave up on watching the movie under Linux and switched to my Windows box.

Nero Showtime works well on my system, except that for some reason, whenever the movie gets to a point where the sound track is really loud, the sound skips and drops out momentarily. Thinking it was a Nero issue, I downloaded and reinstalled the original DVD movie player that came with the computer. When I loaded the movie, the player told me I needed to change my screen resolution, something I had never had to do before. At that point, I called it a day and went to bed.

This morning, I’ve been working since 9:30 reloading PCLOS in an unsuccessful attempt to watch my movie. I also re-downloaded and reinstalled the Intervideo DVD player software, again without success. It is now 1:30 in the afternoon. I have a batch of orange-cranberry muffins in the toaster oven. They have another 5 minutes or so to bake, at which point I will take them out of the oven and let them cool.

While they are cooling, I shall brew a fresh pot of tea and then, having drowned my sorrows in tea and a muffin, I shall retire to my boudoir to watch my movie on the television with my DVD player.

Assuming, of course, I can find the remote, which I haven’t seen for several months.

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A New Blogging Tool

I’m writing his entry with a new tool: Qumana Blog Editor. I downloaded it last night and installed it this afternoon. When I configured it for this blog, it immediately went out and grabbed all of my recent posts & downloaded them to my machine. Nice.

Adding an image is as easy as it is in Windows Live Writer: just click on the Insert Image button, browse to your image file, and select it. You then choose to either insert it in your current post and upload the image file immediately, or just insert it in your current post–in which case it’ll tell you you haven’t uploaded it, and will offer to do it for you. Very handy.

The editor isn’t quite so WYSIWYG as Live Writer, in that there is no web preview function. But it still displays images, fonts, colors, etc., as they will appear in the published version. You just can’t view any style you may have associated with your blog.

I can live with that. The Insert Image function alone makes this an editor worth investigating, as does the price: Zip. Nada. Nuttin’.

Another nifty function in Qumana is the Drop Pad. This is a nifty little feature that can stay on top of your screen while Qumana is running. Find a picture or an article on the Internet that you’d like to include in a post on your blog? Just highlight it, then drag and drop it onto the Drop Pad. It’s that simple. You’ve just copied it!

Need to edit your post’s HTML directly? Just click on the Source View tab and you’re there.

Spell checking is also built-in. So is Live Writer’s. But with Live Writer you have to click on a button to run the spell checker. Qumana can be configured to check your spelling as you type, highlighting your errors immediately. For someone like me whose laptop has stiff keys, that’s a big help.

Dislikes:

Okay, so nothing’s perfect. There’s no choice for me to use my favorite font, Comic Sans. But I can work around that by simply editing the HTML by hand.

Qumana runs under Windows and Mac OS only. There’s no Linux version. I’d love a Linux version. That’s my only complaint.

I’m going to continue using Qumana for this blog, and Live Writer for all my others. We’ll see which one I end up staying with.

I like this program.

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The Beat Goes On

One of the problems with blogging is that to keep whatever audience you may have. you have to be consistent about posting to your blog. Let’s face it: Americans in general and younger Americans in particular have short attention spans. Al that TV, you know.

So if there’s not something new on a web site or a blog, they’ll go somewhere else. Eventually—say, 2 or 3 days with nothing new—they’ll stop coming back.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking this morning over tea. But after further reflection I decided “So what?” Who cares?

After all, one of my biggest gripes about web sites in general and blogs in particular is that many of them don’t really have anything to say. Look at movies: how many movies have you seen lately? How many of them held your interest? And of those that held your interest, what exactly was it that held you? Plot? Characterization? Or special effects?

It’s the same thing with web sites: I can’t tell you the number of web sites I’ve visited that use special effects (Flash, Shockwave, JavaScript, etc.) to hide the fact that they really don’t have any useful content.

Case in point: I recently visited a corporate web site to find out information about a particular product. It was a beautiful presentation, complete with high-quality animated graphics. The mood conveyed by the graphics was one of serenity and relaxation—just what one looks for in a cup of tea. But nowhere on the site could I find information about the particular product I wanted. I know the product exists, as I was drinking a cup of it!

Now, had the web site belonged to, say, a web design company what wanted to show potential clients some of their work, it would have been a perfect fit. But for a company that sells tea, there was too much sizzle and not enough steak. Or, as we used to say about a certain kind of cowboy when I was living in Texas, “All hat and no cattle.”

So there’s another potential blog problem: posting an entry when you really don’t have anything to say.

Which, I guess, is one of the beauties of RSS feeds: by subscribing to a feed, the information gets sent to you whenever it changes or is updated. You don’t have to waste your time checking back to see if anything has changed.

So that’s my resolution for my blogs: if I don’t have anything to say, I won’t say it.